An Interview with Jim Tomlinson

At Pen on Fire:

BDB: Why do you write short stories?

JT: Short stories give the writer a way to look at some single thing that puzzles or interests. You can turn a situation over in the story and examine it in detail. And maybe, as you write, you’ll reach some new level of understanding. Or maybe you’ll just gain an appreciation for the mystery of how complex lives and relationships (both the fictional and the real kind) can be.

…

BDB: Tell me about your latest book.

JT: Nothing Like an Ocean, my second book of stories, is in the publishing pipeline now. It is due out in March, 2009. It’s a sequel of sorts to Things Kept, Things Left Behind (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Like those earlier stories, the new ones are set in and around fictional Spivey, Kentucky. Since it’s a small town, it seemed natural that some characters and settings from the first book would show up again. And they do. Most of my stories are concerned, at their core, with characters in complex relationships, be they brother and sister, father and son, spouses, or teacher and former student. Gunshots are rare, high-speed chases and outhouses non-existent. There are church dances, though, and drinking on weekends, rainy craft fairs, copper thieves, fume-huffing teens, a rescue greyhound, a rare rabbit, and several flavors of burgeoning romance….something, in short, for everyone.

JimT and I have rainy craft fairs in common, though I’ve never been able to make my experience of them show up in my poems.

Read the rest of the interview at the link.